I am deeply saddened to read many comments here and on other diaries, which are so caught up in Hillary versus Obama, that everyone seems to forget what NARAL is about.
At 60+ I am older than most of you I think.
I doubt many of you ever knew a woman who died from a back alley abortion. I knew three.
I walked into my friends room one morning, many years ago, to find her dead in a pool of blood. She got an untrained medical student to do an abortion for her. She died. Alone.
I doubt many of you ever knew a woman who died from a legal abortion - but performed in an inadequate, un-sterile "poverty" clinic. I knew 2.
Eighteen days after a new abortion law went into effect in New York State--on 1 July 1970--the heart of a thirty-one-year-old Puerto Rican woman, Carmen Rodriguez, stopped during a saline-induced second-trimester abortion at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. She was the first woman to die from a legal abortion after the reformed New York State abortion law--legalizing termination up to twenty-four weeks--became effective.(1) This tragic event immediately became a lightning rod for criticism of both national and local reproductive policies and the conditions of public hospitals serving the poor in New York City.
I doubt many of you know women who were part of an experiment conducted on Puerto Rican, and Native American women to pressure them into getting their "tubes tied", never explaining that the tubes couldn't be "untied". No options for these women to get an abortion. I know at least 50.
The majority of women who suffer from lack of legal access to abortion have always been poor. Many are women of color. Wealthy women have always had other options - to leave and fly to other countries.
NARAL continues the fight.
As the campaign for the primary has grown more divisive online, NARAL continues to fight for reproductive rights. Many of the women they are fighting for don't have access to forums like these.
Any person who vows that they will no longer contribute to NARAL because they endorsed one candidate over another is a traitor to women. Period.
Women who were forced to use Norplant. Poor women who were experimented on with birth control pills that made them ill. Women who have no access to condoms. Young women who don't get sex education. Women who have been raped, or victims of incest who John McCain doesn't give a shit about.
Is it more important for you to score political points than to continue to battle for those who have little say in how the system controls their access to reproductive control over their own bodies?
I cherish a copy of an old pamphlet from the 1970 "Our Bodies Ourselves" which is now a fat book. I remember making copies of the information in that book, translating them into Spanish, and holding community education classes for women, going door to door educating women in my community about their rights to control their own lives and reproduction.
But most important of all I remember my roommate lying on bloodstained sheets, cold and dead. Age 19. No health coverage. No money to go out of the US. She wanted so badly to finish college and was not prepared to have a child. So she arranged to get an abortion. She died.
So you all have a right to choose. You can choose to engage in petty political posturing. You can withhold funding for legislative lobbying. You can feel smug in your so-called feminism. But the blood of women like my friend will be on your hands.
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